Colorful Kitchen

Colorful Kitchen

This colorful kitchen is worth your minute study. There are no wasted steps in serving meals or in cleaning up: A drop-leaf cart carries food from range and refrigerator to table in one trip. The folding doors of the dish cabinet open at touch to place contents within easy reach. Featured in the April 1957 issue.

William Howland

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Easily Maintained Kitchen

Easily Maintained Kitchen

Featured in the February 1957 issue, this easily maintained kitchen has enameled steel cabinets with stainless steel counters, which blend beautifully with the warm quality of wood and plaster surfaces throughout the house. The custom-designed smoke hood over the cooking-top and barbecue is appropriately architectural.

Colorful Kitchen

This colorful kitchen is worth your minute study. There are no wasted steps in serving meals or in cleaning up: A drop-leaf cart carries food from range and refrigerator to table in one trip. The folding doors of the dish cabinet open at touch to place contents within easy reach. Featured in the April 1957 issue.

William Howland

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Easily Maintained Kitchen

Featured in the February 1957 issue, this easily maintained kitchen has enameled steel cabinets with stainless steel counters, which blend beautifully with the warm quality of wood and plaster surfaces throughout the house. The custom-designed smoke hood over the cooking-top and barbecue is appropriately architectural.

Maynard Parker

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Open Kitchen

All activities revolve around this open kitchen. The cook can see and talk to guests, and when the accordion-like dining area partition is folded back, the kitchen enjoys the cheerful southern exposure. Featured in the May 1951 issue.

James Abbe Jr.

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Double-Duty Kitchen Island

The cooking counter in this kitchen works from the other side as an eating bar. The refrigerator niche in the brick wall is neatly closed in across the top with cabinets, making one move do the work of two. Featured in the June 1953 issue.

Ezra Stoller

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Pace-Setting Kitchen

This kitchen might not look contemporary today, but in 1950 it was ahead of its time — so much so that House Beautiful chose it as one of three "pace-setting" kitchens of the year. "When you can get a complete kitchen, laundry, and a place to eat into a space only about 12' square, it's a real achievement," the editors gushed. The kitchen boasted a cooking range bisected by a work counter, a hooded ventilator and grille to control cooking steam, odors, and grease built into the wall cabinets, and a washer and dryer in their own corner.

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Revolutionary Ranch House Kitchen

This ranch-house kitchen also was chosen as a "pace-setter" in 1950, sporting a "revolutionary electric range." "This comes in separate units," the editors wrote. "The idea is to use as many four-burner tops, ovens, and storage drawers as space and need demand, in whatever combination is most appropriate. This flexibility of choice means you can have what you want, exactly where you want it, to cater to personal convenience."

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Colorful and Gay Kitchen

A third "pace-setter" in 1950, this kitchen was chosen for its more traditional look. "Traditionalists want a colorful and gay kitchen," according to House Beautiful editors back then. They wrote that the three pace-setters were "revolutionary because they actually offer complete kitchens as they are wanted today, planned according to the best standards of efficiency, time- and labor- saving. And besides this, they are all colorful and cheerful, with a real decorative quality which is related to the other rooms of the house in which they are built."

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House-of-the-Year Kitchen

This San Diego kitchen was featured as part of House Beautiful's first House of the Year in 1950. The American Institute of Architects singled the $9,450 home out for top honors, and House Beautiful followed suit, praising the home for "proving the ideas we constantly crusade for — privacy, climate control, and the warm, welcoming look of the American Style — are not matters of money, but of sound planning and sensitive design." The kitchen was built with a high serving counter, fir plywood walls and doors, and a "luxury window wall, practical only because of fences outside."

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A Kitchen to "Reduce Drudgery"

"It's American to pamper our women — to lighten their workload and reduce their drudgery," House Beautiful editors wrote in 1950. "Here's a new line of kitchen cabinets that pamper through efficiency." The magazine praised the complete baking unit, beverage center, pots-and-pans cupboard, and sandwich unit, designed by Michael Hallward, saying, "His practical analysis of what today's housewife demands in greater convenience has been translated by Frank C. Snedaker & Company into these 'Glamour Kitchens.'"

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Old and New Kitchen

This 20-year-old "period kitchen" in New Canaan, Connecticut, was proof for House Beautiful in 1950 that "old and new materials can be happily married. Beautiful old boards, old weather-beaten brick live harmoniously with new wallpaper and fresh blue enamel paint, stainless steel, and rubber tile. These last two are as durable and carefree as modern engineers and technicians know how to make them."